It could be that the Gimp team and community are so self-selecting, defensive, and idiosyncratic that they drive everyone else who wants to change (read as "imp

It could be that the Gimp team and community are so self-selecting, defensive, and idiosyncratic that they drive everyone else who wants to change (read as "improve") it out of the team and community before letting them do anything to fix it. Gimp stands out among applications I've used as having enduring bad UX for decades, and it's hard to imagine a reason for it other than that efforts to improve it are unwelcome. Even Blender, which I once thought was the only thing worse than Gimp, has successfully turned that around. The reputation that Gimp has for its poor UX is not a random coincidence that a cursed meteor struck it of all open source projects, it's an enduring social problem with exactly that team and community that has earned it that reputation. This enduring social problem won't be fixed by this attitude of "we want it a certain way", that's just defensiveness displacing the critical thinking that was actually needed all along. The suggestion to fork it is in bad faith. A fork goes nowhere unless a critical mass of the development community goes with it, and if you've already driven away the critical mass that could sustain a fork, that can never happen. Don't worry, Gimp is safe, I don't think anyone organized enough to fix its problems thinks it's worth the effort anymore, they're all working on other things instead.